Читать книгу The Ann Ireland Library - Ann Ireland - Страница 27

Potassium slows heartbeat. Eat one banana in the morning, then another an hour before walking onstage.

Beta blockers? Your heart will still thrum, but your hands can’t shake. The drug increases concentration, but it’s a fuzzy focus at the core, a sort of tunnel vision.

One more thing: never look directly at the judges. This is hard, because they will be looking intently at you, noting the way you move — points for presentation and artistic impression.

The four finalists have been invisible all day, confined to quarters. Tomorrow they will stride onstage for the last time, but now they have gathered for supper with their colleagues.

“Last year I was one hundred percent convinced I would win,” Javier says in elegantly accented English. “But taxi crashes into an autobus on the way to the performance, so I was late and in extreme rush. No good.” He shakes his head in sad remembrance.

You could draw a map of Argentina on his starched shirt cuffs. In Buenos Aires a maid takes care of laundry. Her name — he would be surprised by the question — is Adelita.

“So we all play Villa-Lobos?” Trace asks with an elaborate yawn. “Reckon I should glance at the music.” She hauls herself out of the chair while the espresso machine roars. “Anyone got a copy?”

Someone does and hands it to the girl who chews on a string of licorice as she reads through the score. Toby watches this performance. He isn’t fooled for a minute. She knows the piece backward and forward. They all do.

Lucy sits at the other end of the lounge engaged in ardent conversation with the other dismissed contestants. This is how the room has divided itself tonight. The ones left behind huddle in one corner, chatting, while in the other corner the select few who will head into the final heat stare at the floor and speak in nervous bursts. They are different breeds, though everyone tries to pretend that this is not so. It comes down to the rhythm of heartbeat, that elemental.

Only Marcus roams around the suite, a beer can tucked in his pocket and his hair sticking straight up.

Toby flexes his hands, fire hands that will burn through tomorrow’s program. Practising has gone well today; the vapourized section of Villa-Lobos returned just in time.

Someone has ordered in Chinese, and it arrives in cardboard cartons with tiny pillows of soy sauce. Trace snaps open a pair of wooden chopsticks, then another, and passes them around. For a moment the room falls silent as aluminum lids are pried off the containers, paper napkins unfolded.

Jasper would be horrified by the lurid General Tao’s chicken balls, slick with grease and sugar, but Toby dives in, sitting cross-legged on the floor, his back to the wall.

Trace drops beside him, her plate loaded with rice and vegetables and bony fish.

“No Chinese restaurants on my island,” she says. Her heart-shaped face slides into scalp, no boundary of hair, and the vein at her temple pulses with each chew. “No Chinese people, period, except the brothers who own the marina.” She peers at a frill of brown fungus before popping it in her mouth. “Back home one of my best friends is a quad. You heard of Guillain-Barré syndrome?”

Toby has not.

“Quite the horror. Now her arms and legs don’t work, so sometimes I feed her. One day she goes, ‘Trace, how come you’re avoiding the tomatoes?’ And it hit me that I was feeding her like I feed myself.”

Her small ears nestle close to her head, lobes implanted with tiny silver stars. “It’s not as easy as you think to feed someone,” she says, then plucks a piece of glistening chicken off his plate. “Let’s try.”

Toby pulls back, half laughing. “I don’t think so.”

Briskly, like a mother with a small child, she aims the chopsticks toward his mouth. All that’s missing is airplane noise.

He protests, “I’m not at that stage yet.”

Klaus fed Karen every day at the home. She’d sit at the table in her wheelchair, bib tucked under her chin while he’d cajole, “One more bite, liebchen,” tipping a spoon to her mouth.

“It’s an experiment in giving up control,” Trace says.

“I don’t want to give up control.”

“That’s just the point. Nobody wants to.”

He lets the wooden sticks slither between his lips, just this once. She watches as he chews, and after he’s swallowed, she prongs a flowerlet of broccoli and tips it into his mouth. When a kernel of rice lodges on his cheek, she brushes it off before he can get to it. This is what a mother does — no, this is what a lover does.

Suddenly, Toby can’t wait to get onstage. Momentum surges, a mighty storm brewing. Whatever he’s eating is ammo, is blood juice. He’s tasting himself.

“Enough?” Trace says, lowering the chopsticks. Her eyes are wide open.

“Listen up you buggers on the smart side of the room!” It’s Marcus, who stands on a chair holding a can of beer aloft. “We want you geniuses to know that it’s a hell of a lot more fun at our end. Seriously, we drink to your good fortune, but remember —” he tilts the can to his mouth and says “— you’re playing for all of us.”

There’s a distinct pong of “boy” in Marcus’s dorm room — so reminiscent of the twins’ lair at home. Lucy crouches on the carpet and tucks her legs into a half-lotus, a position she proudly manifests due to rigorous yoga training in the past six months. Half a dozen competition dropouts have made their way here after supper, and it was Marcus who poked her in the ribs and urged, “Join us in the lads’ clubhouse.”

She smiles now, a bit too cheerily, and chastises herself, for she has as much right to be here as any of them. More right, if you take into account the fact she made it to the semis, a sore point with some of these guys, but their fragile egos will repair.

The Bosnian guitarist whose name she never remembers cranks open the window and blows cigarette smoke into the courtyard. He’s wearing a fringed buckskin vest picked up at one of the souvenir shops downtown. Eyeing Lucy, he offers a meaningful nod, which she mirrors, though she has no idea what they’re communicating. Armand, of all people, lights up a monster joint and passes it around. Tex draws in, coughs, and passes it to Lucy, who inhales and instantly feels a jolt in her head. It’s been a while. Because of the twins, she and Mark stay clear of the stuff, allegedly to set a good example, not that it’s done a bit of good. The sense of disembodiment that follows the toke is pleasant, and she wonders how many of life’s pleasures she and Mark deny themselves because of the boys. Noisy sex for one.

She’s the only woman in the room — what else is new? Why don’t more females play classical guitar? One of life’s great mysteries. Tilting her head backward until it taps the wall, Lucy bathes in the familiar testosterone bath.

Tex, sitting on the crowded bed, tunes his instrument. No one pays attention when he starts playing. Instead they keep yammering in varied accents about the finalists and judges (“Javier, he holds back until the finals …” “Portia, I play for her in Aspen. She loves dramatic phrasing …”). But one by one voices drop off as Tex launches into the simple “Pavana” by Luis de Milán, the Renaissance composer. He plays with fluid accuracy, each chord hovering before dipping into the next. Any musician in the room could play this piece in his sleep, but for them the race is over and finally they can listen without fear or dismay.

As Tex crunches the final chord, Marcus reaches for his own instrument and points to his backup parked in the corner. “She’s yours,” he tells Lucy.

Her mind scrambles as she unhitches the case and flips open the lid — what might she play? The Bosnian eyes her and performs another of his enigmatic nods. After a quick tune-up, she rolls into good old “Malagueña” — soulful and redolent of Andalusian cafés, not that she’d know, having never visited Spain. Mark keeps saying they’ll go, and last year she even booked a flight, then Mike was sent home for tagging the cafeteria wall and they decided it was unwise to leave the boys on their own for a week, even with Mark’s mother in charge.

This backup guitar has a fatter fretboard than she’s used to and the entire instrument feels boomy, aching to sprint ahead. Lucy plays while sitting cross-legged on the floor, not the most brilliant position as the instrument rocks on her lap, but something lovely and unexpected happens as she enters the middle section. Tex joins in, improvising a harmonic line, then Marcus adds bass, padding out the sound. Competition nerves melt away as they sprawl on bed and floor. This is why they come to international events — to play together when the day is done and nothing is at stake. This is where joyous music happens, not on the stage where they are pierced by light and judges’ stares.

Someone passes around a bowl of chips, and nimble hands dive in. Lucy feels the music rise inside her, untethered and sentimental, almost lustful. She half shuts her eyes and slows down the phrase, feeling the other musicians follow.

Tex passes his guitar to Armand who, without missing a note, continues the harmony, but with a sharper tone. They could be gypsies hunched around a roaring fire, caravans looming in the shadows. The joint comes around again, and the baby-face Quebecker slips it between Lucy’s lips.

If the twins could see her now, as she is, really is, not their mama.

It’s past midnight when Lucy reaches the women’s pod. She coasts down the hallway, slightly stoned, a sensation that makes her feel detached from her body. Is this how the twins feel when they smoke up? Small wonder they sneer at her warnings to quit.

Despite the late hour, Trace’s light is on and she’s going over the same phrase again and again, a tortured renegotiation of every detail. It must have hit her that she has to appear onstage tomorrow, the world’s eyes bearing down.

Such a relief to be free from that stress, Lucy decides. Yet a tiny voice nips at the edge of her mind: If only it was me stepping out there, audience filling the hushed auditorium …

She pauses outside the girl’s room, and the music stops. There is a light clank of instrument being propped against the chair, then the door opens and Trace stands before her, wearing boxer shorts and a man’s undershirt, showing thin, bare limbs.

“You should be sleeping,” Lucy says, aware of a thickness in her voice.

“I can’t.” Trace grips her own elbows, collarbone shooting forward under the loose top. “Every time I lie down I start to freak out.”

“You’re bound to be on edge.”

“What if mess up tomorrow? Everyone will say I’m too young, that I shouldn’t have made it this far. Do you think I’m too young?” Without waiting for an answer, Trace keeps chattering. “So I got thinking that I’ve been playing the rondo all wrong, putting in those sforzandos because I thought they were cool, but they’re not cool. They’re stupid, and it interferes with the rhythm, which is what my teacher told me, but I thought I’d be all dramatic and everything —”

Lucy steps forward and wraps her arms around the girl. She feels the brittle cushion of her body, that shaved head tentatively pressing into her shoulder. So different from the twins who dive into her arms like Spitfires — and that’s when they’re feeling friendly.

“I’m fucking scared,” the girl says. Her breathing is off kilter, too shallow and fast.

Lucy rubs the girl’s prickly head. The boys, as newborns, chirped like fuzzy chicks, the thumb-sized depression of fontanel pulsing in their soft skulls. You kiss the most vulnerable part; it beckons, needing your most tender care.